at each other. I didn’t hate him. I thought I might love him. I wanted to trust. But it scared me to death—the idea of making the same mistake twice.
“I guess you got your comeuppance.” His leg. His whole life…
“I guess I did,” he said.
When I didn’t move, he nodded toward the instrument in my hand. “Want me to do that?”
His question brought me back to bigger problems than my bruised heart or my fragile new faith in the man I was about to take back into my life.
“Yes.” I handed it to him. I had to check on Fiona. “But wait a sec.”
I peeled off his soaked compress, relieved to find the bleeding down to a mere trickle again. Then I picked up a scalpel, pulled up the sleeve of my pink scrubs, and cut my inner arm.
“What are you doing?” Shade reached to stop me, and I twisted away from him.
I made four deep slashes, hoping they’d scar. “Miko. Shiori. Fiona.” I looked at Shade. “You.”
I marked this day onto my skin and then let my blood flow into Shade’s wound, mixing it with his.
“I’m guessing I should trust you on this,” he said a little warily.
“Let’s just say you won’t need antibiotics. I’m sparing you a shot.”
“Thanks?” He didn’t sound quite sure about that. “This is what they want from you?”
“In a way,” I answered. “I’m just the base ingredient for the enhancer they developed.”
“Is this going to do something weird to me?” he asked, watching my blood flow, watching ours mix.
“No. Your system will flush it out. It’s completely compatible.”
“Then what’s special about it?” he asked.
I was too sad and tired to lie—and not even sure I wanted to at this point. “I’m life-form A1. Or something like that.”
He seemed tired, too. Too tired to look shocked. “What does that mean, Tess?”
“It means I beat you out in natural selection. I heal better and don’t get sick.”
Shade pursed his lips, absorbing what I’d said. “Should Bridgebane get that blood?”
Worry about the blood exchange we’d agreed to passed between us with a look.
“We had no choice,” I said. “They’ll alter it with chemicals and drugs and make super soldiers from it. There’s no doubt. But they’ll make dozens. I still have the lab, and there are thousands of injections in it. It was a necessary risk,” I said, remembering Mareeka’s words from earlier.
Shade nodded, seeming to agree.
I wrapped a compress around my arm, not wanting to drip on everything when I went inside to somehow get my blood into Fiona, questions be damned. Maybe I’d answer them. Maybe I wouldn’t. That was up in the air, like everything else.
I started up the stairs. “The super soldier serum? I think Big Guy might be a test.”
Shade grunted as though that didn’t surprise him at all. “At least I finally know what you stole,” he said.
I nodded. I’d even stolen Big Guy, in fact.
“Good for you.” Shade powered up the laser healer without saying anything else, and I went inside to face the horror I knew I’d find on the bridge.
Chapter 30
It turned out that Shade could navigate. That was good, since neither Jax nor I really could. We both saw numbers and our minds went blank. It was kind of a curse. I could steer, but I couldn’t calculate.
The Fold was no longer where we’d last found it. We got Shade to jump us to eight different systems where we thought we might locate it, all without a result. No one was willing to tell Shade what we were looking for or why we appeared to be leaping willy-nilly around Sector 17, which frustrated the hell out of the guy who was setting the coordinates. We kept searching, anxiety and fatigue growing. Shade did what we asked and didn’t press too hard for information, although I could tell he was damn curious. It was obvious we weren’t ready to trust him with a big secret yet, and he respected that.
Big Guy stuck around this time when I asked him to, bringing his personal cruiser on board the same way Shade had. He finally gave us a name—Merrick Maddox. He’d been captured and experimented on, imprisoned for six months while scientists and machines monitored the serum’s effect on his body and blood. The result of making someone with a rebel’s heart faster, bigger, and stronger than everyone else was apparently an escaped prisoner who could find a secret lab and nearly blow it up.